6 Things to Know about Bluetooth Beacons

RE: 6 Things to Know about Bluetooth Beacons

user17652 — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 21:21:57 GMT

If the beacon is used for a niche application and there's a corresponding app to interpret the beacon message then one can certainly deviate from the "standards". My beacon work generates data-varying encrypted advertising messages (no encryption support for advertising messages in BLE4.2) so I don't follow the standards either.

RE: 6 Things to Know about Bluetooth Beacons

user6793 — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 18:29:28 GMT

Jurica,

By not following the iBeacon or Eddystone standards there are some mobile-side feature you won't be able to take advantage of. Especially on iOS.

RE: 6 Things to Know about Bluetooth Beacons

user2435 — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 09:03:44 GMT

Jurica; I think your use case is perfect for a typical beacon :) I guess by signals, the author mean that it doesn't contain much "smartness". As he goes on saying, "Since beacons transmit signals, you must code what that signal means in your application". Your mobile application knows how to interpret and represent the data in the payload, thus making it a useful beacon application.

Also remember, beacon is not a defined standard, so what you choose to use it for is totally up to you. But from what I have seen, beacons are mostly used for sending out small snippets of information. Be that sensor data, location information or similar.

RE: 6 Things to Know about Bluetooth Beacons

user15286 — Sun, 15 Oct 2017 16:40:37 GMT

Hi, I have a question/statement to share with you and would like to hear your opinion. In the company I work, we develop different beacon applications. But we do not respect any standard protocol as iBeacon or EddyStone. We simply made our own protocol and apps. For example, one very simple example is the beacon that measures temperature. We packe the temperature data into advertising payload and advertise that data. And we change advertising data every n seconds [we alse have UUID for our device within payload]. On the other side, an android scans for all BLE devices, parse them and takes temperature data from our beacons (based on UUID). According to your definition of a beacon ("Beacons Transmit Signals, Not Content") this is not a beacon.

What do you think about our approach? Maybe it's weird and misused but works =)

Thanks. Jurica.

RE: 6 Things to Know about Bluetooth Beacons

user17652 — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 23:53:34 GMT

WiFi is not a good option as it drains the battery really fast!